


things you can't say out loud

by speakingincode



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Pining, also there is peeled fruit, third year tsukkiyama, this is just 5k of tsukishima pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28139286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakingincode/pseuds/speakingincode
Summary: In the second drawer of his desk, Tsukishima keeps an envelope stuffed with notes he's written to Yamaguchi. He'll never give them to him.Yamaguchi finds them anyway.
Relationships: Tsukishima Kei/Yamaguchi Tadashi
Comments: 25
Kudos: 274





	things you can't say out loud

**Author's Note:**

> this is for [penny](https://twitter.com/pennu_art)'s birthday!! a long, long time ago, she gave me the prompt "confession." happy birthday penny and i hope you enjoy this :')
> 
> this was originally meant to go on my fluff pseud, but somehow it took me FOUR days to write this two-scene fic, i had to EDIT it, many unnecessary nonsense, so it is here now. it is fluffier than usual though. hope you enjoy it 💚

On some nights, the nights where the aching in his chest gets too severe to ignore, Kei digs a worn envelope out of the second drawer of his desk.

Underneath the too-bright light of his desk lamp, he takes out the notes he wrote months ago and rereads them. Right now, there’s an awkward shadow over Kei’s desktop – an ill-placed water bottle obscuring the words as the light filters through the translucent plastic – but it doesn’t really matter. Kei’s done this so much he has them all memorized.

He moves the water bottle before he picks up the first note anyway, adjusts the angle of his lamp and holds the paper closer to his face like it’s the first time he’s ever seen it. With an exhale that does nothing to ease the tightness in his chest, Kei starts to make out the words.

 _I like you,_ scrawled in ballpoint pen on a ripped-out piece of notebook paper.

Short, to the point, but so hasty and sloppy it looks a little bit like a threat. I like you, and I won’t stop, no matter what you do. True, probably, but not the kind of message he’d want to send when he finally lets Yamaguchi hear him say that.

No. If he ever lets Yamaguchi hear him say that. And he… Kei sighs, and puts the piece of paper in his hands back on the desk. He moves on to the next one.

_Ever since we were younger, you were different from everyone else. I like you. I think I have for a long time. You don’t have to respond to my feelings, if it’ll make things strange, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to not say them anymore, so I’m saying it now. I like you._

Kei’d worked harder on that one, typing it out on his phone first, going through Akiteru’s drawers and digging out a fancy gel pen, asking Yachi if she had a spare piece of nice stationery. He’d even saved a note someone left in his locker earlier that week and used it for reference.

Out of all of them, it’s the note he’d gotten closest to folding up and slipping through the slot of Yamaguchi’s shoe locker. Kei thinks that’s why it’s the one that irritates him the most to read, and why he can’t bring himself to throw it out. The deep folds from the time he’d tucked it into the outside pocket of his backpack. If he ever confessed to Yamaguchi, it would be with this.

It doesn’t matter. Kei puts the piece of paper down and picks up the last one.

_Sometimes when we talk, I get so lost making constellations out of the freckles that dot your cheeks that I forget to hear what you say. Sometimes when I look into your eyes, I think I could make a home in them._

_I like you._

Gel pen and nice stationery. When he asked Yachi for another piece, the next day she came to school and brought him a small half-used pack. ( _The store near my apartment started selling Kitty-chan stationery, so I don’t need it anymore!_ ) Embarrassing, that it seemed like he needed it that much, but it’d been even more embarrassing to ask her every time. Especially since she just looked at him strangely and gave it to him without asking what it was for.

Still, speaking of embarrassing, it was that he wrote that note at all. He thinks that that’s what writing notes is for – the things you can’t say out loud – but he almost gagged after he finished writing it. He thought writing in some half-assed imitation of the poets they read in Japanese class would make it easier, meanings hidden behind pretentious metaphors and over-wrought imagery, but it’d been almost impossible to translate the things he wanted to say. Almost impossible to even put them in normal words after he shoved each too-honest thought into the far recesses of his skull the second they manifested.

If he could ever say these things, it would be Yamaguchi he could say them to. He thinks there’s something Yamaguchi would like about that, but it doesn’t matter. If he gave this note to Yamaguchi, he’d never be able to look him in the eye again.

Well. That probably goes for all of them.

Kei leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, drafts something in his mind.

_I like you, Yamaguchi. Sometimes I feel like I’m tired of liking you, like the weight is too much on the inside of my chest, and then you smile at me, and the heaviness evaporates. And then you call out my name, and I feel it run through my entire body, and I think to myself… I think to myself that maybe it’s more than enough, just like this. That I’m happy I’m wasting all my time in love with you, instead of anyone else._

Kei opens his eyes again, exhales. Saccharine, and he wasn’t even trying for it. At least these days he isn’t feeling so self-indulgent that he writes them down.

Still, he needs to stop doing this. They’d been embarrassing, those two weeks at the start of his third year where Yamaguchi cut his hair and started acting different (so mature in front of the first years, so confident in every play), where the feelings he’d peacefully kept hidden in the depths of his chest suddenly started threatening to bubble out of his mouth, but it’s been months since then. The only reason to look back on an unsavory past is to make sure it doesn’t happen again in the future.

And yet, here Kei is, sitting at his desk in the dead of night, wallowing in words he’ll never share with Yamaguchi.

Kei can’t tell Yamaguchi his feelings in a note. He thinks he’s known that since before he took a pen to paper, but he still indulged the idea anyway, let himself go so far as to steal from his brother and harass his team manager just to pretend he could. Just to pretend it was anything less than pathetic to try to tell his best friend he’s in love with him with a piece of paper.

In elementary school, Kei saw Yamaguchi getting hassled by two-bit bullies at the playground outside their school, and instead of asking if he was okay, or reaching out a hand to help, he scared the bullies away on a whim and left Yamaguchi lying on the ground. The next day, instead of keeping his distance from him the way the people who scared him did, Yamaguchi marched up to Kei and decided they’d be best friends. Made it happen, just through sheer will, and Kei doesn’t know who he would be if Yamaguchi didn’t.

If Kei really does like him, if he really does care about him – and he _does_ , Kei knows because he can’t stop, has been trying to stop since years ago but never could – he won’t confess to him in such a pathetic way. The least Kei could do if he’s going to make him carry his feelings is say it to his face.

(And he won’t, ever, but Kei accepted that a long time ago, learned to manage his feelings a long time ago, the two-week outlier notwithstanding. He knows now, how to swallow the too-affectionate things he wants to say, how to dismiss thoughts that get too close to the vicinity of romantic. _You’re a good captain, Yamaguchi_ – and nothing else. Not until Yamaguchi is at home in his apartment, safe from anything Kei might try to admit to him.)

Kei sighs as he looks down at the pieces of paper stacked on top of his desk. He should’ve thrown these out the second after he’d written them. He should’ve never written them at all.

As he tosses the notes into his desk drawer without even putting them back in the envelope, Kei resolves to never spend a night like this again.

✑

Kei’s carrying a bowl of carefully peeled mandarin oranges into his bedroom when he finds Yamaguchi in his second desk drawer and his life flashes before his eyes.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei says when he sees him, too sharply, and Yamaguchi’s eyes widen like he’s been found standing over a dead body.

He scrambles to close the drawer and backs up to where he’d been sitting before, leans back against Kei’s bedframe while he flashes him a wide grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I didn’t, um— I was just looking for a pair of scissors, and I remembered that you keep them in your second desk drawer, so—”

“I keep them in the third desk drawer,” Kei corrects him, putting the bowl of oranges next to Yamaguchi on the floor. “Don’t—”

 _Don’t go through my things_ , Kei wants to say, but it’s too harsh, and he doesn’t like the downturn of Yamaguchi’s mouth as it is. It’s Kei’s fault this even happened, and those boundaries never existed between them until now; he wouldn’t have cared if Yamaguchi opened the right drawer.

He sighs as he reaches for the pair of scissors out and hands them to Yamaguchi. “What did you need them for, anyway?” he asks, and Yamaguchi laughs awkwardly, picks up something next to him and holds it out towards Kei.

Kei takes it, looks at it carefully.

It’s a paper T-Rex fashioned out of a cut-up calculus quiz; Kei would chide him for it if Yamaguchi hadn’t gotten a near-perfect mark. He holds back a sigh when he notices the frown and a pair of glasses doodled on the dinosaur’s head.

“This is for you,” Yamaguchi says, but the teasing lilt to his voice is uneven. “Yacchan’s been learning to do origami for stress relief, and she showed me how to make a paper dinosaur in between classes. I wanted to make one that was me, so he could have a friend, but I didn’t have any scissors, so…”

Kei sets the dinosaur on top of a box on the corner of his desk. It’s such an idiotic reason for Yamaguchi to find out what he found out, but at the same time, there’s something about it. How _Yamaguchi_ it is. “You finish your homework too quickly. You should focus more on studying,” Kei says. “Anyway, finish making your dinosaur and eat. I didn’t peel all those oranges for nothing.”

“Thanks, Tsukki.” Yamaguchi smiles gently, humming to himself as he picks up a folded-up quiz and starts cutting it up. Some awful song that’s been on the radio lately.

Yamaguchi’s overcompensating, Kei thinks to himself as he turns back to his assignment, but it’s better, probably. To have him pretend he never saw anything than to have to sit through a rejection.

Kei sighs, maybe too loudly, but when he turns to glance at Yamaguchi, he doesn’t even notice, too busy frowning at his cell phone screen and undoing a fold. He’s either lost himself in the motion, or aggressively pretending to be.

Kei decides not to think too hard on it.

✑

Maybe fifteen minutes later, Yamaguchi stands up and put the dinosaur on top of the textbook passage Kei’s been pretending to study. “I finished,” he says. “It’s, um… It’s harder without Yacchan helping me when I make a mistake.”

The dinosaur is smaller and a little more uneven than the one Yamaguchi made of him, but there’s something charming about it. The wide smile Yamaguchi doodled on it, the pointed eyebrows. But… Kei bites the inside of his mouth, and then takes his pen and dots freckles on the sides of the dinosaur’s cheeks. “I fixed it,” he says.

There’s a ghost of pink on Yamaguchi’s face when he plucks it out of Kei’s fingers, and Kei doesn’t think about how it makes him feel. He doesn’t think to himself that Yamaguchi probably knows how it makes him feel, if he— “If you’re done ruining my dinosaur,” Yamaguchi says, putting it down next to the one he made earlier. “There. Now he’s not lonely anymore.”

“I didn’t know he was lonely in the first place.”

Instead of jabbing Kei’s arm or saying something like _Sure, Tsukki_ while sticking his tongue out at him, Yamaguchi just looks at him strangely and says, “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

There’s too much weight to it, the kind that makes Kei’s stomach turn. Yamaguchi retreats back to his place on the floor, either noticing Kei’s uneasiness or feeling it himself, and Kei decides he’s had enough of dancing around Yamaguchi. Turns his chair around to face him, looks at him in a way that Yamaguchi can’t ignore.

Yamaguchi is jittery, now, without the distraction of a complicated art project. He picks up a mandarin and breaks it in half, offers Kei one of them when he feels him staring and then starts shoving wedges in his mouth too quickly. “It’s sweet,” he says after he swallows, forcing a grin. There’s juice dripping from his face. Kei hands him a tissue.

It’s not that sweet. “What’s wrong, Yamaguchi?” he finally asks.

“Nothing’s—” Yamaguchi starts to say, but a single glance at Kei’s face is enough to stop him in his tracks. He sighs. Pulls his knees up to his chest and moves his gaze to the ground. Kei can’t see his eyes. “Um, those notes were confessions, right? In your drawer. I didn’t— I realized pretty quickly, so I stopped reading them, but they were, right?”

He stopped reading them. He probably didn’t recognize Kei’s handwriting. The racing of Kei’s heartbeat slows, just a little. “They were,” Kei says, and his mind starts threading through a million possible lies, the millions of other reasons he’d have a stack of confession notes in his drawer. He felt bad throwing them out, he didn’t want the people who wrote them to see them in the school’s trashcan and was too lazy to recycle them here, he—

“You don’t usually keep them,” Yamaguchi interrupts, and he swallows. He takes the last orange wedge he has and nibbles on the edge of it. “It must mean something to you. And… that’s Yacchan’s stationery, isn’t it?”

It is Yachi’s stationery. Kei should have realized he would notice. He watches the cogs turn in Yamaguchi’s head, but before he can put everything together, Yamaguchi cuts him off.

“It’s— uh… It’s romantic! That you guys are writing each other love notes. Or she’s writing them for you. I never knew you’d be the type, Tsukki. To like that kind of thing. You could keep them a little neater, though.”

Yamaguchi is looking up now, forces a laugh again. He pops the orange he’s been nibbling in his mouth whole and swallows, wipes his hand on his pants.

“You’re good at keeping secrets. Both of you. But, um… you don’t— you don’t have to, you know? If you’re dating Yacchan, I… support you guys! I really like both of you, so…” He looks away from Kei, leans forward to rest his arms on his knees. “I wouldn’t have told anyone if you didn’t want me to. The only person I can’t keep stuff from is you. I guess that’s not… mutual… but that’s fine!”

It’s been a long time since Kei’s seen Yamaguchi like this. Middle school, probably. When they’d see one of the kids who used to torment Yamaguchi while they were out together, and he’d be a quiet mess by the time he got to Kei’s house.

He didn’t even act like this the time they lost the Interhigh in their second year. It stings, somehow, that the idea of Kei dating Yachi breaks Yamaguchi’s heart that much. Kei feels his own heart break in sync.

Yamaguchi’s feelings are… It’d been a long time ago, but he shouldn’t have just brushed it off. He should’ve known that Yamaguchi was the kind of person to hold on to his feelings when they manifested, to let them grow inside of him instead of shoving them into shadowy corners.

“Do you still like her? Yachi?” Kei asks, and his voice is small. It sounds like someone else’s.

“What?” Yamaguchi asks, brows furrowed. He’s looking at him again. “Is that why you didn’t tell me? I guess it’s a little better if that’s why, but… I’m not that weak! Even if I did like Yachi, I care about you being happy more than I would care about a stupid crush, so…”

Yamaguchi doesn’t like her. Kei feels something swirl inside of his chest, the kind of thing that makes Kei kick Yamaguchi out of his house before it grows even bigger. “Why are you so upset?”

“I’m not… Sorry, Tsukki. This is actually really good news, and I should be happy for you! I am! I just… because I told you about Yachi, way back in our first year. I would’ve thought that you could tell me if you were dating someone. It would… I guess you didn’t think it was my business. But you’re my best friend, and…”

Kei exhales. He wills whatever was in his chest to die peacefully. “I’m not dating Yachi,” he finally clarifies, standing from his chair and sinking into the space next to Yamaguchi. He reaches past him for an orange, presses half of it into his fingers after breaking it. “That’s why I didn’t tell you I was.”

“But… that was her stationery, wasn’t it?” Yamaguchi asks as he takes the orange from him, sticky fingers curling to brush against Kei’s. He brings the entire mandarin half to his mouth and breaks off a wedge with his teeth.

“It was. It was also Akiteru’s gel pen. I borrowed it from her. Well, I guess she gave it to me, since I wasn’t able to give it back,” Kei says, but he knows it isn’t enough. He thinks about the truth, and tries to figure out a way to explain it to Yamaguchi without saying too much. “There are things that are hard for me to say, so I write them down. It feels better if I write them on nice paper. It’s… It’s embarrassing that I have to do things like this. That’s why I never told you about it.”

Yamaguchi considers it. Kei watches him tilt his head as he chews, watches the idea roll around his skull. “Like a diary?” Yamaguchi asks, and before Kei can pounce on the excuse, Yamaguchi continues. “But… you said they were confessions.”

Bending the truth. If Yamaguchi keeps pushing, his words are going to turn into outright lies. “They’re things I can’t tell anyone.”

“Before. I saw the words ‘I like you,’” Yamaguchi says. “Are you… lying, Tsukki?”

Technically not, Kei thinks. There are some things I can’t tell you, Kei thinks. “I…”

“No, I… You don’t need to…” Yamaguchi exhales heavily, like his inexplicable sadness has turned to smoke inside his lungs and it’s billowing out. He lowers his legs from his chest and crosses them, rubs the back of his neck as he smiles apologetically back at Kei. “I get it. I know you have trouble saying things, sometimes. Especially since it’s just a crush and not that you’re dating anyone or anything. I didn’t really want to admit that I liked Yachi to you, either, back in our first year. You just figured it out!”

Yamaguchi laughs, and it’s a little forced, but it’s lighter, somehow, than all the laughs he forced before. He nudges Kei in the shoulder.

“It’s one of my favorite things about you, actually! That you’re not like anyone else. And also that you’re so tall.” He leans over then, rests his head on Kei’s shoulder. His cheeks are warm. Kei can feel it through the fabric of his shirt. “Sorry I got so worked up. I try not to act like this around you, too, so I can’t say anything, either.”

I don’t mind, Kei thinks. If it’s you, I don’t mind. I… Kei tsks. Tries to stay on target. “You don’t have to,” he says, and then lets the words sit for a second. It isn’t enough.

Half-lies, bent truths. He understands Yamaguchi a little better, now. He’s always known there are sides of Yamaguchi that he doesn’t get to see – the awkward politeness with teachers and strangers, the confident kindness with underclassmen – but that there are parts of himself that Yamaguchi actively tries to hide from him. It stings, even if he’s done the same.

The whole truth. Kei thinks about Yamaguchi’s head on his shoulder, and the swirling in his chest that he isn’t supposed to feed. That Yamaguchi feeds without even realizing. “Yamaguchi… the way I feel about you is… To me, you’re…”

Yamaguchi laughs, then, something genuine. “It’s okay, Tsukki. I already know. We’re best friends, right? You don’t need to say it for it to be true. So don’t force yourself to say something hard for my sake. Save it for your first girlfriend! Or… boyfriend. I guess we haven’t talked about that either, but we don’t have to. It’s okay. No matter what.”

Kei thinks about it. Thinks about _I already know._ Yamaguchi saying his favorite thing about Kei is that he’s so different, even though it’s always been him who’s been different, from the beginning.

_Don’t force yourself to say something hard for my sake._

He gently nudges Yamaguchi off his shoulder, holds back the urge to kiss the confused look off his face as he crawls over to the second drawer of his desk. Carefully, he gathers all the letters he wrote months ago, organizes them into chronological order, and holds them out towards Yamaguchi. “Read them.”

“Huh?” Yamaguchi cocks his head to the side, but after Kei doesn’t say anything, just gestures to his hand, Yamaguchi pops the rest of the orange half he’d been eating into his mouth and takes the stack from Kei. Kei thinks about the juice getting on the notes he’d tucked neatly into an envelope so many times, and then decides that it doesn’t matter. That he should’ve either thrown them out or done this a long time ago.

They’re only pieces of paper, Kei thinks to himself as moves back to the seat next to Yamaguchi, leans over to read over his shoulder.

 _I like you_ , on ripped-out notebook paper _._ Yamaguchi laughs when he sees it. “You don’t waste a word, huh, Tsukki?” he asks, flashing him a grin. “I understand why you borrowed paper from Yachi now. This looks like something a serial killer would write. You’d probably scare off the person you like with this.”

I didn’t, Kei thinks, but what he says is, “I don’t want to hear that from someone who gave me a dinosaur made out of their calculus quiz.”

“I think I put more love in Dino Tsukki than you put into this note,” Yamaguchi says, laughing to himself, but there’s something fond behind his eyes. A second passes, and he looks closer at the note, runs his thumb over the words. He turns his back to Kei, smile softened into something gentle, and he tries not to melt underneath his gaze. “I’m joking. Thanks for letting me see this. You didn’t have to.”

He’s thanking him too early. Kei brushes it off. “Is Dino Tsukki his official name?”

Yamaguchi pouts at him, exaggerated, and shoves him gently. “Why? Do you want to think of a better one?”

Kei pretends to think it over, rolls the orange half in his palm. “I’d rather not.”

“I thought so. You’d probably name him something awful,” Yamaguchi says, glancing up at Kei’s desk as something like an afterthought. They can’t see it from this angle, but his mouth curves up into a pleased smile anyway. “Dino Tsukki is a nice name. He doesn’t need anything fancy. He knows who he is.”

“Me, but a dinosaur.”

Yamaguchi laughs, but he’s already moved on by then, attention back on the ripped-up composition paper in his hand. Kei watches as he reads it over one last time and carefully moves it to the back of the pile between his finger.

Yamaguchi’s mouth quirks upward when he looks at the next note. “Yacchan’s stationery,” he says almost fondly as he smooths over the harsh lines where it was folded before. “It’s nice you put so much effort into this. I can’t even imagine it.”

He hasn’t read it yet, Kei thinks. It’s strange. There should be a tinge of bittersweetness, or apprehension, or fear in this moment – the second before Yamaguchi finds out, and everything changes – but Kei’s chest won’t tighten, Kei’s thoughts won’t wander from this second just to be afraid of the future. The taste of oranges is still on his tongue, and Yamaguchi is talking to him like this.

But the second passes, and Kei parses the words at the same time that Yamaguchi does.

_Ever since we were younger, you were different from everyone else. I like you. I think I have for a long time. You don’t have to respond to my feelings, if it’ll make things strange, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to not say them anymore, so I’m saying it now. I like you._

“Tsukki… this is…” Yamaguchi starts to say, and the gentle amusement that colored his expression sobers into something that makes him worry his bottom lip.

Cute, Kei thinks, instead of anything else. He imagines pressing his mouth against the line that’s formed between Yamaguchi’s knit eyebrows. “Hm?”

“N—” Yamaguchi’s eyes dart to Kei’s, and he bites his lip harder. “Nothing.” 

The serenity is gone from Yamaguchi’s expression, replaced with a flush of pink that reaches his neck. He moves the note back too quickly, nearly folds the entire pile in half. He holds the paper closer to his face this time, and Kei can’t see the contents of the note from over his shoulder.

It doesn’t matter. Kei knows it by heart.

_Sometimes when we talk, I get so lost making constellations out of the freckles that dot your cheeks that I forget to hear what you say. Sometimes when I look into your eyes, I think I could make a home in them._

_I like you._

“Tsukki… did you really write this?”

Yamaguchi’s voice is strange, and small, and Kei thinks about running his fingers through his hair. “I wouldn’t have lied to you about it if I didn’t.”

“But, Tsukki,” Yamaguchi says, like he’s pointing out some logical fallacy, “these are about me.”

It’s funny, the way he says it. It isn’t even a question. He wonders if Yamaguchi is rationalizing it in his mind somehow, like Kei steals confession notes out of his locker and stashes them in his desk drawer. “They are. I…” Kei swallows. “You told me I didn’t have to force myself to say something hard for your sake.”

“Is that… that’s what you were trying to tell me? I thought…”

“I didn’t think it’d take you so long to realize it,” Kei says. “I was hoping you wouldn’t have to read the last one.”

Kei’s eyes are trained on the side of Yamaguchi’s face. The shock in his voice, the small ‘o’ of his mouth. The reality of this moment is settling in now, but it isn’t as terrifying as he thought it would be. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did when Kei sat at his desk and poured his feelings out onto notebook paper on a whim. Maybe he’s shouldered all the pain already. Like how the first time you scrape your knee, you think you might die, but the hundredth time you barely notice it.

Still. Yamaguchi won’t speak. Kei’d said that last thing to throw Yamaguchi a lifeline, an invitation to make fun of him and just brush the moment off, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he just stares at the note like there’s something in it he’s missing, something that will point to someone else.

Kei closes his eyes, leans back against the bedframe. Decides to let what happens wash over him, and move from there. He’s shouldered the pain already.

And then an elbow digs into him and a different kind of pain blooms in his stomach. When Kei opens his eyes, Yamaguchi eyebrows are narrowed and his lower lip is sticking out in an overblown pout, but Kei can’t mistake it. The way the ends of Yamaguchi’s mouth can’t stop themselves from curving upwards. The red of his cheeks.

“I— I also told you to save it for your first boyfriend, Tsukki! This is such a weird way to confess!” Yamaguchi complains, but the arm that elbowed him hooks around, Yamaguchi’s hand closing around Kei’s upper arm and jerking him downward. His arms move to circle around Kei’s neck, and he pulls him so close to him that their foreheads touch. “But…”

“Yamaguchi, what are you—”

“I wanted to…” Yamaguchi’s biting his lip again. Kei isn’t comfortable with this, doesn’t like the way Yamaguchi’s bringing his attention to his mouth when they’re this close, doesn’t know if he can control the pounding in his chest when they’re this close. And then Yamaguchi says, “I like you, so…”

It’s strange. All the time he spent brooding over his feelings, all the time he thought about running his fingers through Yamaguchi’s hair. He never imagined how those words would sound in Yamaguchi’s voice.

It’s enough. Every time Kei didn’t tell Yamaguchi he was cute, every time he shoved his hands in his pockets instead of reaching for Yamaguchi’s palm, every time he rubbed his neck to stop thinking about pressing his lips to Yamaguchi’s freckles.

Kei tilts his chin forward and kisses Yamaguchi on the mouth.

Yamaguchi’s lips are rough against Kei’s and he’s still at first, from the shock of the connection, but the taste of him is sweet from the oranges Kei peeled so carefully. Kei feels it, then, from everything welling up in his chest. This is how he can tell him. More than notes he’s thought too long about, even more than words that fear made it impossible to form in his throat. His mouth on Yamaguchi’s, and how warm his arms feel wrapped against his neck.

Yamaguchi’s grip tightens around him, suddenly, and he opens his mouth, presses their lips together with even more intensity than Kei had before. He heard him, Kei thinks, and then Yamaguchi climbs onto his lap, and he can’t think anymore.

It feels like hours later when they come back up for air, even though Kei’s phone only says ten minutes. Yamaguchi settles back into where he was sitting before, suddenly embarrassed by the way he was hanging off of him. “I like you,” he clarifies as Kei straightens Yamaguchi’s mussed hair with his fingers.

“I think I already knew that,” Kei says, patting his head before he gives him his space back, contents himself with just looking at Yamaguchi, how red his mouth has become, how the pink flush has been there so long it might as well be permanent.

“Hmph,” Yamaguchi says, and jabs him again. When Kei doesn’t say anything else, just looks at him lazily, he picks up the notes he’d left on top the envelope, glances over each of them again. “I like how you ended all of them with ‘I like you.’ Like you thought maybe I wouldn’t know, even though you said that weird thing about making a home in my eyes.”

“I thought you’d like that.”

“I do,” Yamaguchi replies, flashing him an easy smile and leaning his head on Kei’s shoulder. “I like you.”

“And you were making fun of me for repeating it,” Kei teases, but the joke sounds off in this moment. He reaches for Yamaguchi’s hand and intertwines their fingers. Thinks about his weight in his palm. Words he has trouble saying out loud. “I… I do, too.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Tsukki,” Yamaguchi says, laughing gently as he nuzzles his cheek into Kei’s sleeve. “I already know.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading my silly fluff piece. if you need anything i am on [twitter](https://twitter.com/jailsgrr/status/1339938178787139584).


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